Micro Placement with City of Birmingham Rockets Basketball Club

My experience at City of Birmingham Rockets Basketball Club

I completed a placement with City of Birmingham Rockets Basketball club which allowed the development of vital skills needed for the working industry. My role during the placement was a social media assistant. The Placement commenced from 16th July to 3rd August 2018. During this time, City of Birmingham Rockets Basketball Club held their annual 'Hakeem Olajuwon International Summer Camp', which I helped plan and organise along with a small team. This experience allowed me to develop my media skills as well as helped me to understand the running of the event.

City of Birmingham Rockets Basketball club is a non-profit company that aims to improve and develop young peoples basketball as well as teach them life skills needed for society. Robert Palmer is the Managing Director for the club meaning he oversees the day to day running of the company. Robert Palmer was my supervisor during my time at the company, making sure that tasks were met as well as having one-on-one meetings with myself to discuss progress and potential new areas of work to focus on.

During my time with City of Birmingham Rockets Basketball club, I was often left to my own devices when giving tasks to do which gave me a sense of independence as well as showing that Robert Palmer thought I was reliable enough to conduct certain tasks on my own. Despite my overall role being a social media assistant, my role did vary to help prepare for the upcoming event.  I had administrative roles such as sending emails, attending and participating in meetings, making and receiving phone calls and sorting out equipment. As the event week commenced, I was supporting the children especially those who were away from home and finding it difficult to cope. I helped plan, create and develop promotional videos for the companies Facebook page. The videos made helped promote the companies aim and the success of the event as well as letting the parents of the children involved being able to see their child in action.

I worked both in a team and independently, which allowed me to gain and improve on my communication skills both verbal and written forms. Participating in formal meetings as well as answering phone calls furthered my development in communications. The research that I conducted regarding how to improve the companies social media presence proved effective as the videos that I conducted with the coaches and players had one of the highest viewers which demonstrated that the videos reached a large audience.

Not only did I gain a lot of skills from this placement, I also found a fondness for working on projects and seeing it being successful. Working at this placement, I felt involved and valued and my work paid off as the children had fun as well as the event running smoothly. I would love to be given the opportunity to work on a project like this in the future.

Life Decisions 

I am at the end of my second academic year at Birmingham City University. This Academic year, I have tried to push myself into thinking what career I would like to pursue once I graduate. After much research, I am leaning more towards careers involving social media and digital marketing. I enjoy using social media for personal reasons but have also seen the positive side of using social media for revenue and brand promotion. I am currently looking for many opportunities to gain work experience in these fields.